DARPA Shows Off Emergency Bot by Boston Dynamics

A team over at The
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA for short, have recently
unveiled a new robot. The robot has been dubbed the ATLAS and just like his
mythical counterpart he is one beefy guy. The robot, which weighs about 300
pounds and is over six feet tall, is designed to help humans out when the going
gets tough.

The emergency robot
was constructed by a team at Boston Dynamics in response to the DARPA Robotics
Challenge, which tasks creators with creating robots who can work well in high
risk situaions. As part of the evaluation process the robots was paired with
teams from various agencies, including NASA, to prove its worth in field
simulations.

“The Virtual Robotics Challenge was a proving ground for
teams’ ability to create software to control a robot in a hypothetical
scenario. The DRC Simulator tasks were fairly accurate representations of real
world causes and effects, but the experience wasn’t quite the same as handling
an actual, physical robot,” said Gill
Pratt, program manager for the DARPA Robotics Challenge in a release put
out by DARPA. “Now these seven teams will see if their simulation-honed
algorithms can run a real machine in real environments. And we expect all teams
will be further refining their algorithms, using both simulation and
experimentation.”